Book Review: The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace, by Lynn Povich

Abstract

Lynn Povich The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace. New York: PublicAffairs, 2012. 288 pp.In the beginning of Povich's book, she describes several young college-age women who were interning at Newsweek magazine in 2006. Over time, these women realized they were being discriminated against from promotions to story assignments. This was something they only began to understand when they spoke to each other privately. They soon realized the same had happened at the magazine decades before, yet had largely been forgotten.Povich's new book tells the story of the women behind the 1970 class-action sex discrimination lawsuit against Newsweek. It fills an important part of journalism his- tory and provides context for current issues of gender and journalists. If we are in what some have described as post-feminist era, why is there so much gender inequity among who is being covered and by whom? The complicated answer-a mix of insti- tutional sexism and Title IX world where education seems equal-is aided by this book.Knowing who went first and fought for the women who would come after them is valuable. In the summer of 2011, Jill Abramson was named the first female editor-in- chief at The New York Times in the newspaper's 160-year history. Significant in the reporting of the story were the people involved in the class-action gender discrimina- tion lawsuit Boylan v. The New York Times that paved the way for change. I'm extremely conscious that I stand on the shoulders of women-some of whom I never met, Abramson said.1 It is worth remembering that in April 2013, someone found it newsworthy to note that as boss, Abramson was bossy.2Other than Nan Robertson's book about the Times case, Girls in the Balcony,3 jour- nalism history rarely includes the stories of the women who filed lawsuits to get their media companies to do the right thing. Yet, these cases directly led to doors opening for journalists such as Anna Quindlen and Gail Collins to publications like the Times. As the late journalist Kay Mills wrote of women's roles in the media: Enlightenment alone did not unlock newsroom doors. Legal action helped.4Povich describes her title as a coming-of-age story for generation of 'good girls' who found ourselves in the revolutionary '60s (p. xix). It was time when advertise- ments for jobs were still listed in the newspaper by gender-a column for men and column for women. Yet, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, overt discrimina- tion based on gender had become illegal and actionable.This well-documented book reads as part memoir and part documentary as the author explains her personal and professional struggles at the time as well as those of her colleagues. Looking back after all these years, through either interviews with the involved parties or reexamination of old letters, allows for perspective. The book should be required read in journalism history classes, as well as women and the media classes.What is especially important to the Newsweek story is that these were the women who went first. They laid the groundwork for the lawsuits to be filed by other women in media during the following decade. Most of these highly educated women could rise no higher than researcher at the liberal news magazine. …